


One Big Reckless Misadventure

by Caligula_II



Category: RWBY
Genre: Original Character(s), Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2020-09-28 03:24:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20419115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caligula_II/pseuds/Caligula_II
Summary: This is a story following a team of original characters on a plotline parallel to the canon RWBY storyline, in which they will meet minor characters and throw some fan-made light onto some liked but not very well-known characters. This storyline is structured so that it is potentially canon, so large events will affect the plot, and any plot events in the story will either be a part of those or will be created so that they wouldn't alter the canon timeline.





	1. A Slight Complication

Pick anywhere you want; it will always look different from the sky. Ryder Steele had walked the forests around the borders of Mistral city for as long as he had been able to fight, but he could still barely think that the living wooden web that you see looking up from a path and phe patchwork carpet of greenery that you see looking from an aircraft as one and the same. He had a feeling that he would probably resolve that should they have enemy contact, but then decided that such contact out here in the back of beyond would only lead to minor elucidations, and would leave both him and his team with the longest hike any of them had done since their shadow mission. That would be both decidedly uncomfortable and bloody annoying.  
Ryder was thinking all this through standing at the open door of a bullhead, scanning the canopy for any signs of an airship crash. There had been a missing person report for a Mistral airship pilot recently, but that was not special. What was special was that he had been hired using the bank account of a disgraced, and presumed deceased, atlesian scientist Arthur Watts. Thus the plot thickened. A dead man hired a freelance pilot to fly him to an undisclosed location. Both of them then disappear with no discernable trace. The cherry on the cake, and the reason that team Ryder’s team (RKLS) were investigating the disappearance, was that this concerned the nation of Atlas. This meant it swiftly fell into the capable hands of Atlas Special Operations Command’s External Affairs wing, who offered a frankly obscene amount of money to any Atlesian huntsmen and huntresses outside of Atlas for a temporary operative contract. Needless to say, Ryder’s finger was the first to the “accept” button.  
This left team RKLS cooped up in a bullhead - Ryder leaning out of the door, the ever so snappy Katya in the pilot seat, Luna (her non-identical twin) sitting in the main compartment and the ever so mysterious Solitaire sitting opposite - on the trail of a dead man, and a missing pilot. Ryder leaned out of the bullhead, holding a support rail. If he were anyone else, the wind would’ve ruffled his hair as it did his coat, but his unique semblance and constitution meant his hair stayed put. He was, and had been from the day of his birth, made of a constantly shifting metal amalgam - much to the shock and bemusement of his parents and the medical staff. The metal man-mountain looked for all the world impassive and apathetic, but another quirk of his semblance betrayed any emotion he had. The more stress or excitement he felt, the less his body acted like a solid and the more it acted like a viscous liquid, a combination of the wind and his nerves set his high cheeks rippling slightly.

“How long’s it gonna take to find the bastard?!” asked an impatient voice from the cockpit.  
“For the umpteenth time, it will take as long as it- hello, there’s a pillar of smoke at near enough 2 o’clock. Now how many of those do you see in the jungle, Katya?” came the exasperated and ever so slightly snarky response from Ryder. Indeed there was - a small speck on the skyline growing ever so slightly larger each passing second.  
“Woo-fucking-hoo, we aren’t going to fail our first mission as spec. Ops.” commented a thin, white girl sitting in the main compartment of the bullhead. Her voice was dripping with sarcasm, and had been the entire way - obviously sour at the choice of mission.  
“Luna?” asked Solitaire, speaking for the first time on this journey.  
“Yes?” came the inevitable and impetuous reply.  
“Shut up.”  
* * *  
The debris field was a mess. The smoke was coming from the engine block, which had come clean of what the team could only assume was most of the airship: a blackened pile of wood and steel with what looked like a burst breather tank a little way away. Ryder thought he saw a prop blade pinning a scrap of sail to a tree on the edge of the impromptu clearing.  
This appraisal was cut short by a blip on one of the myriad screen segments in the cockpit, followed by an incessant tone.  
“CONTACT!” yelled Katya, over her shoulder. Whatever she spotted on visual, it wasn’t nice. The only thing Ryder could see was a black speck in the debris field. It was too small to be a grimm, even a creep, but that was a fairly small problem compared to the whitish things soaring towards the bullhead. The aircraft pitched to avoid them, half-successfully; At least seven off-white knapped-looking bone darts punctured the hull, and an acrid smell started to permeate the cabin. It was probably the coolant or fuel, or both.  
The ship lurched downward. “Brace, brace, brace!” Katya shouted “Ryder, jump. I don’t want a ten-ton pinball in this tin can when it hits the ground!”  
“I don’t appreciate the dig at my weight, Kat. I’m not ten tons.” he responded.  
“Just fucking jump, OK?”  
There was no reply, just a grunt and a sudden pitch to the left.

Ryder was now in freefall, oddly calm and free. His breathing slowed, and with that slowing in pulse, he started to harden. He dropped like the lump of metal that he was, and landed with a massive thud, a cross-legged meteor that obliterated almost everything within a few feet. The bullhead streaked across the sky, trailing dark smoke. He hoped it didn’t explode.  
He pulled his pistol, Love, from its shoulder holster. It was large , and had an underslung barrel that could be used to fire shotgun shells, 12 gauge grenades, or anything with a diameter of roughly an inch. It made the pistol look much more substantial, and gave a much-needed extra kick to his trusty sidearm.  
He swept the gun across the clearing before noticing that black speck, only it wasn’t a black speck anymore, it was a silhouette next to a tree. A very human silhouette, but it was completely black except for a porcelain face and glinting crimson eyes. It was definitely a grimm. Its face was disconcerting, though, and the twisted expression on its face resembled calm shattered by pain. The bone-like darts were aligned along one arm, and the other arm sported a long horn, completely straight and roughly the length of a spear. It said nothing, it just started walking toward him.  
Love spoke once, and the grimm hesitated. There was no wound visible, no scarlet interior, no smoke. It just kept coming, seemingly unperturbed. Ryder fired again and again, hitting it solidly until he ran out of bullets in his magazine. This was obviously having little effect, so he started to move as he reloaded, trying to maintain distance until his team turned up. The grimm-human replica started jogging and running, sliding its spear down its arm. Ryder turned back to deliver a few harrying shots. They didn’t slow it down in the slightest. The grimm was gaining on him, closing the ever smaller gap between them. He realised that he really had nothing left to lose. He picked a purple tube out of a pouch and inserted it into the underslung barrel of his pistol. It was packed with shards of gravity dust, guaranteed to atomise almost anything in front of the muzzle. It was also guaranteed to throw him across the clearing, but that couldn’t hurt at this point. He took aim; the creature was almost on him now. He pulled the trigger, and sent the dust payload rocketing towards this humanoid monstrosity. He flew back, all of his metal bulk hitting a large tree and leaving a comically large print. He looked back and saw the monster almost where it had stood. It was stopped in its tracks, and the spines on its left arm had marshalled together into a solid block of chitin. The bone mask was gone, and the face underneath was human - entirely sable, but still human. Stringy red strands of muscle adorned its head, under its mask and down its back like some sick melding of arteries and hair. The face moved, and elicited a grating, clicking noise that could barely be deciphered as speech.  
“Nothing more than… a man.” These two phrases felt as if they were taken from different sentences, disjointed and seemingly strung together, taken from two different people, or the same person at different times. The creature lunged with its spear-like claw, covering the distance between them almost unnaturally fast, following with a flurry of impacts from the chitin shards. The claw glanced off, leaving a sting, but Ryder took the brunt of the shards. They scraped over his clothes and chest. He ducked and rolled away into the face of another onslaught.It sapped a chunk of his aura in those two hits alone. It’s intelligent, he realised, it’s using those shards to wear down my aura! He immediately knew that he needed to avoid the devastating cloud of knapped needles, because even his metal constitution wouldn’t hold up to this sort of punishment for long without aura.  
Ryder drew Hate from its sheath. It was a large machete, with a handguard and a vicious area of serrations on the back of the blade near the hilt. He needed both his weapons for this. He popped off a few shots at the grimm to keep it occupied, while loading another cartridge of dust. It was steam dust, this time. He hoped to send it under that thing’s shield, and distract it long enough for him to do some damage with Hate. He started to run full tilt at the grimm, aiming Love at the ground in front of it.  
It swung. He fired. Everything was white for steam. Ryder got to where he thought this grimm was, and swung. It wasn’t there, there was just air. Then he encountered bone, and it kept coming. It pushed past his guard and came up around his throat. By the time the steam cleared, the monstrosity had closed its grip around Ryder’s neck; it whispered a single one single, harrowing sentence.  
“Do you believe in destiny?”  
* * *  
Ryder heard a gurgling noise by his ear, followed by the sound one would expect from a high-pressure hose. The pressure on his neck loosened, and the claw fell away. When he looked round, he noticed the creature, on its back, spewing crimson liquid to create a macabre halo. It kept mouthing the same thing over and over. Destiny… Destiny… Destiny… Nothing more than a pitiful shadow, trying to speak even as it disintegrated into a tiny measure of smoke.  
“New grimm.” said a voice close enough to startle him. Solitaire stood not three feet away, after making her way toward the conflict post-haste and helping get Ryder out of a remarkably sticky situation. Her eyes were wide behind her ballistic mask, and she looked thoroughly shaken. “Difficult?”  
“You have no idea.”  
“No, I probably don’t.” was the curt answer. “Get to the ship.”  
“Yeah, let’s do that.”  
The bullhead wasn’t as hard to find as the Mistral ship, which was not only because it was considerably closer to where they set out from, but also because it was in considerably less pieces. They could see the impromptu LZ from the top of a tree, and made a beeline for it. The ship, for all the holes in the hull, was still in rather good condition; the only problems being that it now had no coolant, and that there was a possible hole in the fuel tank. The latter seemed to not be too much of a problem, as any damage would normally have happened by now. The coarse repair to the hole essentially consisted of a magnet and a plate of metal, and Kat found a strange passage in the pilot’s manual about field repairs: “If coolant is lost, and there is no nearby resupply points, then congratulations on finding the back of beyond. Also, urine or powdered ice dust can be used instead of proper coolant to get you back to safety.”  
After a short while of the team awkwardly looking at one another, Luna said “Hey, Ryder. You have ice dust in that pouch of yours, don’t you?” This defused the situation somewhat, and Ryder started prising the cap off one of his many shotgun shells in his pouch. The light blue powder in there was then tipped into the coolant tank; Rinse and repeat until he thought there was enough in there.  
“Thank the gods for robust engineering, eh?” he said to Kat.  
“Thank the Schnee Dust Company, Ryder.” was the response, “I hear you have the Ice Queen’s ear.”  
“I think she likes me.”  
“Yeah right. I hear she’s after that girl. Y’know, red hood, black hair?”  
“Rose or something, I think.”  
“Hey, Ryder. You turned her lesbian.” joked Luna, tasteless as usual.  
There was a collective groan from the other three, and a chorus of “fuck off”s directed at Luna.  
The banter continued, with Solitaire being solitary, as per the norm, and the other three just generally took the mick out of each other. When they finally got back to Mistral airspace, the air changed from bantering to extremely grave. Questions like “Did we actually succeed?” and “What do we put in the report?”. This petered out, but then Ryder stunned them into silence.  
“I shot that creature several times, and it didn’t flinch. It didn’t even penetrate the skin, it just pinged off like it had aura.”  
Kat was the first to respond. “You what?!”  
“That grimm looked human and acted like it had aura.” Ryder reiterated. “It wasn’t like any other grimm I’ve seen.”  
“How? If it had aura, how did it get it?”  
“I’ll be honestly fucked if I know. We need to put that in the report.”  
The rest of the flight was in silence.


	2. Drinks All 'Round

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, team RKLS haul themselves back to Mistral to rest and recuperate, after a fashion.

The bullhead limped back to the hangar in Mistral, steam coming out of various holes it probably shouldn’t. They were cleared without incident, and were met by a disgruntled mechanic. His face turned from mild annoyance to abject horror at the sight of the dropship looking like a piece of swiss cheese, swore under his breath, and enquired as to what, exactly, happened out there.  
“That was a grimm.” was the characteristically blunt response from Ryder.  
The mechanic was perplexed. “Did you tangle with a flock of Nevermores or something?”  
“It’s classified under the Atlesian military secrets act, but I can tell you it was scarier than any other Grimm I’ve ever fought. Hell, it was worse than any I’ve ever even seen!”  
The mechanic muttered something about SOCom’s cloak and dagger bullshit getting out of hand, but the team let it slide. They knew why they were here, they knew why he was here, and neither included defending the honour of a hated branch of the Atlas military, so they instead made their way to the edge of the airfield, skirting the various crates and piles of miscellaneous equipment heading toward the shipping containers. They were stacked in such a way that it reminded Ryder of a large, industrial patchwork blanket, constantly being picked apart and re-threaded by the cranes that surrounded it. The constantly changing skyline was something that he could simply sit and watch, most days, but there were things to be done; reports to file, and grillings to be had for all of them. First, however, was the issue of food. They hadn’t had anything since an early breakfast and it was nearly 7 o’clock in the evening, so a meal and a good drink was in order for each of them.

***

Just past the shipping bay, tucked into an alcove within the mountain itself, was a little pre-war gem of a restaurant-bar-club hybrid that Luna had found recently on one of her “shopping” sprees. However it was found, it definitely filled a níche, both literally and figuratively. In fact, it was that particular níche that both Ryder and Kat loved, and both had been waiting for an excuse to go there. The team made a bee-line for the place, walking past the cranes and instinctively ducking under the crane arms, despite them being over fifty feet above. After negotiating them, the team found the main public through-tunnel, leading up the mountain. Off it sprouted various tunnels, and doors were dotted along the sides, signposted as maintenance rooms or shops. Some were for even bigger establishments, and it was behind one of these which laid the bar; if Luna remembered right, it was near the entrance, and was called the “Cockpit and Chassis” - obviously a regular haunt for pilots and other airstrip workers.  
For once, Luna’s memory served her correctly, and the Cockpit and chassis was the third door on the right. From outside, strains of jazzy improvisation could be heard faintly through the door. This was definitely the right place. They pushed the door open to a warm cavernous area, illuminated by what looked like gas lamps, with little níches for lantern-lit tables for two or four. On the other side was a set of steps, leading up from the main area to a smaller cavern with cooler lighting. The team liked the look of the other cavern, and took off over the large floor of the warmer cavern. They made a strange sight - a metal man-mountain and a girl spiderwebbed in hydraulics - both barely eighteen - flanked by a denim-sporting tomboy and someone who looked like Lady death was trying on her new black dress and bionic arm combo, who could have been anywhere from seventeen to twenty one. Even so, none of the early-birds seemed to bat an eyelid. Other than two or three, they all worked on the airstrip, so it wasn’t their first time seeing the odd posse, and those that didn’t were at the bar, too inebriated to react to anything short of a bar fight. They walked up the steps, and found the room with cooler colours to be much more like a pub. Tables and chairs were scattered through the room, mostly next to stone-hewn and leather-upholstered bench-style seats built into the wall. The whole lot was catered for by a bar covering one side of the room, and there was obviously a spot for a band on a mezzanine against the adjacent wall. Even though it was unoccupied, the drum kit and piano on there was enough of a giveaway. The bar was staffed by a tall adolescent, with his back to the group. His beard outgrew his silhouette, and parts seemed to furl and unfurl whilst he polished one of the bar’s many glasses. He turned around, and his beard was actually furling and unfurling; it was made up of not hair but six tentacles, each moving with a different yet unified intent. The young man was obviously a faunus, and probably worked here in the underground to avoid the many faunus-haters on other levels. It saddened Ryder to see someone, even one with such irregular features, persecuted simply for their existence to such a point that their best work prospects were underground.

The bartender must have noticed Ryder staring because he raised a quizzical eyebrow at him in such a way as to ask, as he must with most new customers, “What are you looking at, exactly?”. This look turned from annoyance to recognition once he looked past the staring steel youth to the slight figure in the back, and then to a sort of more than friendly grin.  
“Well well, I knew you said ‘dork posse’, but I didn’t expect… well… this!” he said, gesticulating at Ryder, Katya and Solitaire.  
“Well hello to you too, Drayton,'' said Luna, with a ghost of a smile on her lips and walking toward the bar. Drayton immediately set to, making a complex drink from what looked like most of the bar’s stock, and asked over his shoulder “Do any of your friends want something?”.  
Kat chimed in “I’ll have a mojito, for starters.”  
“Could I have a whiskey?” added Ryder, politely and bluntly at the same time.  
Solitaire stayed silent, tapping her metal hand on the table, until jabbed by Kat; she then said in a small voice that she wanted a tonic, no gin and no lemon.

Drayton prepared the cocktails in almost zero time, and opened the tonic for Solitaire. Then he asked Ryder what whiskey he wanted.  
“Scotch, single malt.” Ryder replied in his characteristically blunt tone.  
“Yeah, but which one?” asked Drayton again, revealing an entire shelf of bottles of whiskey, each slightly different to the next, from pale malts through darker, peatier styles. Then on the end was a bottle labeled in stylised font as “dust-cask: premium”. It had a sparkle to it that one wouldn’t associate with whisky, glinting even out of direct light, and catching the light even in shade; If you looked closer, you’d notice tiny electric arcs throughout the bottle. Ryder was instantly smitten, and asked for a tumbler.  
“You sure? That’s strong stuff, and it has dust residue. Dust residue, man, residue from the stuff you use to make explosions?”  
“Please don’t patronise me, I’m really not in the mood. And yes, I am sure.” riposted Ryder, not happy about the bartender’s overexplaining. He just stood there, tired and waiting for his drink. Drayton poured it, and then began mixing a creamy-looking drink.  
“What’s that?” asked Ryder  
“Fire extinguisher, complementary with dust-cask,” said Drayton, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”  
The metal man ignored him and took a sip. Intense was somewhat of an understatement; having a localised thunderstorm in your mouth was a more suitable description, even though Ryder didn’t cough it all over the table. His throat burned as he swallowed, but then the dust-cask settled in his stomach, radiating a warm feeling throughout his body.  
“That’s not that bad, but holy shit, was that a drink and a half!”  
“Fire extinguisher, sir?” Drayton said in a sarcastic, mock-waiter tone.  
“I’m good, thanks.”  
The bartender was surprised; most experienced drinkers splutter their way through a dust-cask, but this guy was taking it like a champ. The metal giant slugged the rest without a cough, and opened his mouth. Barely a wheeze came out.  
After a solid minute of hacking, he finally croaked out “That’s some strong stuff!”  
“Aye, and you can’t say I didn’t warn you.” chuckled Drayton, failing miserably to suppress a smile. He finally stopped trying to hide it and simply stood cackling. “You really can hold your drink though, man. That stuff’s left proper drinkers retching for the rest of the night and you just chugged it!”  
The first regulars were starting to filter in, a trickle of fairly well-off teenagers, barely able to drink, and finding this as a place to escape the hated parents. They looked to the bar with bemusement, and wondered over, then raised their eyes at the unusual group and promptly turned an about face and sat in one of the alcoves in the dance cavern instead. The team were happily chatting, and all had more drinks. Solitaire had more tonic, Ryder switched to a whiskey without dust, and with a name he couldn’t pronounce. Luna finished her cocktail and immediately ordered a copious amount of pink gin and lemonade; Kat simply asked for another mojito.

***

By ten in the evening, the team were starting to slur their words, apart from Ryder, who seemed to have a strange resistance to alcohol, and Solitaire, who just drank tonic the entire evening. However, dinner had finally been arranged; Luna had finally decided on her meal, and the cook, nicknamed “Frypan” apparently, had finally finished cooking, and an immaculately dressed waiter carried the steaming meals to the table. They were eagerly anticipated, and burnt tongues were endured by the whole table. Solitaire sat with her back to Drayton and the other patrons, and had removed her mask. Underneath was a kindly face, hardened by unspeakable trauma, with two gleaming jade eyes set in her face. Her hair, though predominantly black, showed a glimmer of red from the roots if the light caught it in the right place. She bolted her food whilst trying and failing to keep at least a tad of sophistication, and hastily replaced her mask. She always ate like this, and the team assumed it was simply some self-consciousness problem. Well, most of them. Ryder knew something, but he refused to tell anyone what it was. He was sometimes like that. As it was, it was time for a toast. Ryder was wracking his brain for something to drink to when Luna just burst out “To a fuck-up, of mishi - fuck - of mission-critical proportions!”  
Everyone laughed, and Ryder remarked “Fuck it, I’ll drink to that!”  
Everyone else tucked in, Kat and Luna getting more of their food around their mouths than in it, realising and quickly wiping their faces to make sure it didn’t look like they were completely shitfaced. Yet. Ryder was still coherent, and ate his meal - steak with chips and veg - looking at the hammered twins and thinking “I really wish I didn’t have to share a room with these two tonight.”

The bar was a respectable size, so even though there were enough people to warrant an extra bartender, it still felt fairly roomy. By the time the team were done eating, it felt crowded enough to feel like a proper club, and the dance floor was well filled. Luna started to slur something about going down there, but Kat quietly shushed her, and said in a less slurred voice “I think we’re gonna go to the dance floor. See ya!”  
“Alright, but don’t kiss the musicians. I really don’t want to have a repeat of last time.”  
Kat and Luna gave sloppy salutes, whilst Kat said “Sir, yessir. Sir.” and immediately burst out giggling, which set her sister off. Once they had regained a bit of composure, they set off for the dance floor, swaying from left to right. They disappeared into the crowd, and Ryder looked toward the mezzanine. Between their meals arriving and him finally looking in that direction again, a massive beast of a human with a greenish brownish mane and matching beard had hauled a double bass onto the raised spot, and two young adults and a teenager took their places around him. The two adults - a lanky manling in a brown greatcoat and a less scrawny man in a black-and-grey suit - took seats behind the drum kit and on a chair behind a trombone respectively. The teenager took a seat at the front, holding a trumpet with the ease of a seasoned professional. She was almost albino, with peroxide blond hair and pale skin, but also had cold, slaty eyes, which gave her an even more striking appearance. Her features were a sharp contrast to her outfit - black leather jacket and black jeans - but she still blended with both the mezzanine and the cavern. It only took the DJ turning down the music gently and a cough from the teenager to turn almost all the heads in the club to her.  
“Welcome to the Cockpit and Chassis. This is gig night and I am Ever. I hope y’all don’t mind, but we’re now gonna replace the piped music with a bit of our own!” the trumpeter then stepped away from the microphone in front of her, and the quartet starts with a drum flourish. In the pause, however, the drummer got up and walked over to the piano, and then when the music started, the room could still hear the drums. The drummer had got up, started playing the piano, and was still there playing the drums! He obviously had some sort of cloning semblance.  
The tune was upbeat and jazzy, seamlessly mixing and phasing out the recorded music, and the band were keeping the song easy enough to follow that the drunks on the dance floor didn’t fall over. Ryder asked Solitaire about the place, but she was lost in her thoughts. He then floated off himself into ideas of airships, pilots, and dead scientists.

Then the door slammed open, and a massive thug, in his mid twenties with a field of stubble and a reek of alcohol, burst in with a lazy, overconfident air.  
“Well well, isn’t this a tacky little setup,” said the thug, “With a scumbag squidface for a barshit, and know what I do to animals like them!”


	3. Uncouth Intruders

The thug raised his hand to his belt and whipped out a long knife, probably pilfered from his mum’s kitchen. It wasn’t very impressive - looking akin to something you would cut steak with - but in a club almost entirely full of civilians, it could definitely cause some damage. He swayed and lumbered across the dance floor, parting the crowd like he was some kind of drunk Moses, and spouting derogatory epithets all the while. The guy started up the steps toward the bar, ad was staring as intently as he could, as pisshead drunk as he was, at Drayton. This obviously meant he wasn’t watching anyone else - least of all the tiny girl that was, until Brawn McNobrain here crashed the place, playing music for the club on the mezzanine. Leaving her trumpet on her chair, she strolled through tables with a fluidity that was more akin to that of an accomplished fighter than a musician; however, each conflicted with how old she seemed to be - she could be no more than eighteen.  
The thug was still spitting insults at Drayton, none of them making any real sense. “How’s about a little beard trim, Squiddy?” he asked, drawing the knife under his chin in a sawing motion. “Feeling a little choppy, are we?”   
Drayton simply stood still, concealing a smirk, and said nothing. He knew what was coming, and didn’t want to interrupt the moment.

Ever started to jog, almost silent as her soft rubber soles landed again and again on the tile, and made straight for the attacker. She started picking up speed until she was running full tilt down the gap in the tables toward the thug. By the time she had covered half the distance to the guy, she was already at a terrifying speed, and she yelled “Hey, fucknut. I got something for ya!”  
The man turned to see a veritable bullet of boot and black leather bearing down on him. Then the impact came. One foot connected with the man’s jaw, and elicited a crunch, either from his jaw or whatever small amount of aura he had. Then the girl twisted in mid-air to launch the heel of her other boot into the other side of his jaw. There was a sickening snap, and the man’s jaw literally dropped a few inches; despite the soft rubber soles on her boots, she had either broken or dislocated both sides of his jawbone. The thug dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes, and didn’t move. Ever knelt down and checked for a pulse in his neck, and seemed satisfied. Then she looked toward the dance floor and noticed the fifty-odd pairs of saucer-wide eyes staring at the scene. She gesticulated to the DJ hiding behind the speakers as if to say “What are you doing? Turn the bloody music back on!”.  
The slightly tinny jazz started playing from the speakers again, and the clubbers - in various states of inebriation - went back to dancing and socialising. They were all too drunk to care, once the music started again - with the exception of a weedy man who masked his frame with a long coat and baggy trousers. He sat in an alcove with a tiny woman who seemed split down the middle in terms of her hair, eyes and attire, and a rather rotund woman in purple, with a large spider tattooed on her back. They looked like they were leaving space for someone, but no-one was there. No-one had been there all night, but the space was still there.  
While the crowd settled, the larger of the three remaining band members left his double bass, and proceeded to drag the thug around the dance floor and out of the door. Ryder decided he’d seen enough for the night, and looked over to Solitaire. She was almost asleep; the evening must’ve gone on longer than he realised. He gave her a poke, and said it was time to leave; the pair tried to be unobtrusive, so instead of hollering over the crowd, they scanned it. Solitaire soon spotted them near the edge of the crowd, and quickly strode down the steps toward them. Ryder noticed they were deep in conversation with a partygoing couple, and as much as he hated curtailing conversations, even more of the nights drinks had obviously caught up with them. He nudged Kat, and said “Y’know, it’s a little late for you to be chatting everyone up, especially if we have paperwork tomorrow.”  
“Aw, come on. We weren’t chatting them up, Ryder,” Kat slurred back, “Were we, Luna?”  
Luna shrugged. “We kinda were, Kat. That isn’t really a reason to stop though, is it?”  
Ryder had heard enough. He just grunted a “sorry” to the couple, and hauled the pair off toward the door. Neither of them really minded, but they couldn’t let Ryder know that. They just stayed silent.

As they were walking out of the door, the weedy man in the trenchcoat walked up to the bar and started talking to the bartender.

***

Outside the club, all was silent. Fresh air was filtering through from the outside, and the unconscious thug was propped against the door; the double-bass player was tending to him, and making sure he didn’t vomit into his airways or die in some other ignominious fashion. Other than that, there was no-one in sight. The not-quite-dark tones from the mouth of the tunnel meant that it was still night, and the team made their way back under the cranes, and across the airfield. The place was still, and there was never a vaguer void to exist in. Ryder loved the place, and would have dawdled in one of his many regular daydreams had he not got a pair of drunk teenagers to marshal home. This being the case, he trundled along toward the other end of the airfield, directly toward the team’s apartment.

By the time they had circumvented the various bits of debris from daily work left out each night, the moon was not at its zenith, but was well on its way. Frost was already forming on the pavement, glittering slightly around the gates onto the road. It didn’t crunch underfoot, but the cold was starting to sting. The apartment was only across the road, though, so it wouldn’t be long before they were back in the warm. No-one complained about hurrying the last few metres across the road and up the steps into the apartment building. They all trooped up the stairs, and bundled into their cosy, central-heated apartment.  
None of them wasted time getting ready for bed, and they were all thankful to get their combat gear off, and while everyone else was able to do it within two minutes, Kat had an … interesting … problem with her attire. She had had an unfortunate run-in with a large bullet whilst out of aura. The shock from the bullet, besides puncturing and organ rupture, also completely removed her right breast on exit. From intensive care, she was wheeled out with simply a crater in the right side of her chest; there really was nothing to salvage. The details were blurry, but Ryder knew that between then and when he met them shortly after the fall of beacon, she had gained a prosthetic that hid the crater. It looked like an atlesian sports bra, but was way more complicated to remove; by the time it was off, everyone else was almost asleep in their bunks. It seemed no-one was wanting to wait around tonight.  
Kat finally extricated herself from her prosthetic, and got into bed, only to hear quiet giggling from the bunk above. Much to the others’ annoyance, Luna was simply laughing away to herself on the top bunk. Ryder grumbled something unintelligible, the gist obviously being something along the lines of “Shut up, Luna.”. That being said, she would not stop giggling; something had obviously occurred to her that was extremely funny, but that could’ve been anything in her intoxicated state.She finally stopped giggling long enough to speak, and just said three words.  
“Tits of steel.”

This set the entire team off; the sheer absurdity of the comment was funny in and of itself, but the blunt way of naming such a hi-tech piece of equipment only added to the hilarity of the comment. Even Ryder started laughing as quietly as he could, and the sound was similar to that of a snorting pig, which set everyone off on another round of laughter. They gave up all pretence of quietness, and just started laughing and guffawing at a simple phrase that had no right to be that funny.  
Once they settled down, the team were out like a light.

***

The room was quiet, the boards not quite silent. The timbers were old, and the sky outside was the colour of bile. Ryder felt cold, and when he tried to get out of bed the movement felt restrained, like there was water where the air should be. His feet touched the floor, and he heard a clank and a muted thud. He tensed. It had been a while since he felt like this, but was attuned to the patterns like tracing scars. He was here. He was here and He was here to kill Ryder.  
The thud woke Kat as well. She was confused, wondering who would be using the kitchen at this hour. She scanned the bunks, checking who was out of their beds, and her eyes widened when she found Ryder next to her, Luna in her bed and Silver asleep, hanging half out of the bunk. She knew it was bad. She knew it was bad and she knew it was a horribly dangerous situation. She hid behind Ryder, who crept out of the room strangely quietly for half a ton of metal. The door was painfully close to creaking.  
There was no-one on the landing, but there was a breeze flowing through the house. There wasn't usually a breeze in the house, but Ryder knew it was the front door. He crept down the stairs. He counted them; one, two, three, four… they didn't creak, and Kat followed him down. Sixteen, seventeen, he was almost there. His foot was heading for the bottom step. Almost there. His foot connected. The wood bowed. It didn't creak. It should creak. It always creaked. Every time. Ryder felt strange, he had anticipated the stair creaking. He carried on to the hall, finally seeing the edge of the intruder. A corner of a greatcoat. The edge of a hand. A blade longer than his arm. Even the sight of him set Ryder on edge; he had never got so close to someone so dangerous, someone so intractably deadly. He felt an arm on his shoulder. He jumped and took in a silent gasp; he was in uncharted territory, and had been since that step hadn't creaked.  
It was Silver. He must have heard the noise and come down to investigate. He pushed past Ryder to get closer to the assailant. He planted a foot. The floorboard bent. It creaked.

The assailant turned to face them. His face was obscured by a respirator; it was covered in a verdigris patina, and accented the air of death surrounding him. Under the greatcoat, he reached for something.  
"Well, this makes things easier, doesn't it?" Every syllable was enunciated, and elicited a small puff of water vapour from each valve. Silver's response was only to block the two others, showing protectiveness beyond his years. He grabbed Love from the table just inside the room, and aimed it at the assailant and loosed off the cartridge in the underslung shotgun piece. The assailant chuckled grimly, and the dust took a chunk out of the wall. He began walking calmly toward Silver, and he seemed out of touch with reality; like he was pretending to touch the floor. Silver loosed off a few bullets, but each and every one of them passed through. Each one left a trail like TV static through his body. He finally reached Silver in his slow, deliberate gait. Silver was out of bullets. The assailant held Silver's shoulder, and then ran him through with the blade. Ryder was close enough to hear the hiss and grating of his aura against the edge of the blade. It passed through his body and aura with scary ease. The assailant whispered "And for the record, the name's Caligula." He deftly pulled the blade out of Silver, and tossed him aside like a crumpled drinks can. He removed from his coat a massive revolver. The hammer was cocked, and Caligula pulled the trigger.

Kat saw the hammer arc toward the striker, and acted. She pushed Ryder out of the way, and would have gotten out of the way too, had the hammer not been cocked. The hammer hit home, and the bullet came racing down the barrel.

Ryder staggered back from where he had been a moment ago, and was sprayed by some sort of liquid, and chips of hard stuff. He could still see the gun, even though Kat was in front of him. He didn't want to think about it, he just ran down the hallway and to the door. It was closed. Another massive piece of metal sped down the hallway. It must have missed, because he never felt it hit, and finally got the door open. He ran full tilt away from the house, and ran and ran until he gave out.


	4. A restless night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After one nightmare after another, Ryder abandons any attempt at sleep for a spot of paperwork.

Ryder woke in a cold sweat in the bunk bed in their apartment. The curtains were flapping slightly, but there really wasn’t much to set him off. He got up anyway, and started pacing toward the french window. Ryder was fairly sure they were closed when he went to sleep. Everything else was normal. Kat’s bed was still occupied, as was Luna’s. Everything was still dumped on the floor where they had left it. He parted the curtains and stepped out of the french windows onto the balcony. Solitaire was there too. She was looking out over the landing bay, at a twinkling network of whitish dots that make the skyline look like some pointillist masterpiece under an abstract astral canvas in the sky.  
“Same old-”  
“Yeah. Same old, same old; I can’t shake it.” Ryder completed her sentence for her. “You’ve been having your own problems.”  
“Unfortunately. Just my old life, with the friends I made and the moments I had-”  
“You wish you could go back. Either to pick back up, or say one final goodbye. It isn’t gonna happen-”  
“I know!” She snapped, before regaining her composure again in a split second. “I know. I just can’t lay around and do nothing, waiting for the next time we risk our godforsaken lives for another bunch of pen-pushers.”  
The hulking teenager draped a leaden arm around her slight frame. “We know. Sort of. I know as well as anyone. Almost dying really does something to a person.”  
“I know. I mean, who would’ve thought it, right? It’s just… It’s not that. I know I can’t get back at the maiden, or be a protagonist in this convoluted clusterfuck of misadventures. It’s just that I had everything at beacon; I had friends, I had grades, I had a good challenge or two. I even had someone that never looked at me as ‘The Girl Wonder’ or ‘The Bronze Legend’. The nearest he got was ‘The Girl on the Cereal Box’, and it never occurred to him that this girl who won all her fights was known anywhere other than our dorms.” She chuckled, staring as if the solution to all her troubles lay beyond the skyline. “ Then I-”  
“You did nothing. Nothing. The Black Queen, or the maiden, or whatever the fuck you called her, did… whatever the fuck she did, and brought the Grimm into Vale. We’ve been through this how many times now? You know what, don’t tell me; it’s too many, any way you spin it.” Ryder answered his own question, as he did all too often.  
Solitaire just sat there, taking great interest in her shoes like a scolded child.  
“Look, I might not be the most outwardly-”  
“Thirty-two.” Solitaire said, seemingly out of nowhere.  
“What?”  
“We’ve been through this thirty-two times, now.” Solitaire said matter-of-factly, trying to hide her problems behind a calm voice and a mask. “More or less the same argument: that I didn’t do anything wrong, or that the circumstances were out of my control and I know that. I know it like I know that someone else will eventually see me like I’m not some sort of thing that never needs a rest, or personal space, or any real break from people in general.” She gently removed Ryder’s arm from around her shoulders. “I just don’t feel it.”

Ryder took it as a sign to move away, and he ambled back inside the apartment. There were things to do; reports to file. People to avoid pissing off.  
Ryder sloped off, sensing he wasn’t wanted there anymore. It was still cool inside, and Ryder couldn’t go back to sleep. It would only leave him worse. He deliberated internally over what to do for a second, and resolved to sit down at the desk to make that disappointing report.

“Special Operative Ryder Steele. Team RKLS: Reckless. Mission report. Missing ship and person found, person matching description of deceased Arthur Watts still at large. Crash site was infested with Grimm; our transport was brought down. Details of the particular Grimm will be given at debrief - I’d rather not leave it on cyberspace.” Ryder started his report, talking aloud whilst writing. “Subject was neutralised, but our ship was almost totaled. I request additional support for any future missions concerning this figure. Identity is uncertain, but there was no trace of him at the crash site. Watts look-alike: MIA. Presumed extremely dangerous. End of report.”

That was over quicker than he had expected. It was over much quicker than he had hoped, as well, but that couldn't really be helped. The only other thing to do was get some sleep, or try.   
“Sleep,” he said, “Perchance to dream.” He allowed himself a derisory snort. He really didn’t want to dream.


End file.
